Advertisements are ubiquitous. The radio, TV, cinema, YouTube, Spotify, the sides of buses, windows, posters, neon lights, the applications on one’s mobile phone, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, online games – all of them are filled with advertisements. It can be questioned whether there is a place left that would not be exposed to advertising. The extent of advertising has resulted in advertising becoming a popular research and discussion topic. Some topics have received more attention than others, for example, gender images and representations of women and/or men have been extensively studied and reported on. How different groups of people respond to advertisements has also been a popular study object. The focus of this research paper is, however, one that has not been widely studied: how children are visually represented in advertisements aimed at adults.
The purpose of this thesis is to discuss and research advertisements with representations of children. The advertisements are examined by making use of Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar which they presented in 1996. The Visual Grammar is a systematic grammar of visual design and a demonstration of how meanings are created through visual traditions and regularities in Western image composing. By Western visual tradition and culture, Kress and van Leeuwen do not refer to cultures of specific countries, but to a visual resource that has globally spread.
It is like any other grammars that are commonly associated with linguistics: it is both a description of how elements are used and as well as a set of rules. It does not take a moral stand or criticise the choices made by the creator of an advertisement, but provides a way to approach the subject objectively and to create a neutral description of how, in this case, children are depicted. It does not, for example, focus on why there is a child in an advertisement, what might be the reasons ‘behind the curtains’ or what the consequences are to society of using a child representation. However, since their grammar is based on how visual images are built in Western cultures, the Visual Grammar not only enables studying images systematically, but also reveals the motives behind creating an image in a certain way.
In the previous studies about children and advertising, children are seen as potential consumers or as targets or even victims of advertising. There are concerns expressed over advertising to children and how our society raises the consumers of the future (see e.g. Linn 2005, Thomas 2007, Gunter and Furnham 1998, Acuff and Reiher 2005), and also apprehensions of how presenting children in advertisements can endanger
“the innocent childhood” by for example sexualising the image of a child (see e.g.
Faulkner 2011, Holland 2004, Merskin 2004, Vänskä 2012). Moreover, in the previous studies the profile of how children are represented in advertisements is either quite outdated (Hood, Heinzerling, Chandler and Hausknecht 1995), based on just one material source, which affects the profile inevitably (O’Dell 2008, Vänskä 2012) or the target audience of the advertisements is children (Jennings and Wartela 2007, Strasburger, Wilson and Jordan 2009). The aim of this study is to create a more versatile profile and, in a way, contribute to the profiles that others have already created.
In order to research representations of children in advertisements, three volumes of Time magazine were selected; volumes of 1994, 2004 and 2014. These three volumes were chosen not only to create a versatile profile of a child representation, but also to enable a comparative discussion between years. Moreover, as the aim of this study is to examine advertisements that are not aimed at children, but the targeted audience is an adult one, Time magazine is decidedly a valid data source. Furthermore, as the Visual Grammar is a grammar of Western visual literacy tradition, the optimal data source was decided to be a Western one as well. Altogether 80 individual advertisements were discovered; 19 in volume 1994, 37 in volume 2004 and 24 in volume 2014.
To discuss the representations of children in advertisements, I created a classification system of my own and labelled the different categories as Types. These Types were formed inductively by a preliminary analysis of the data in this study and deductively by following the rules of Visual Grammar set up by Kress and van Leeuwen.
However, even though the Types follow the Visual Grammar, they are my own construction. Generating the Types was motivated by two different positions: firstly,
by aiming to create a comprehensive example of the visual representation of children and secondly, by aiming to aid the comparison between different years.
The analytical method of the present study is qualitative content analysis. Qualitative content analysis enables a qualitative way to describe a large data by creating a systematic description of data using a coding frame. It reduces the data by focusing on certain, predetermined aspects and by reducing the data, examining and describing this amount of material becomes possible. The coding frame of this study is both concept- and data-driven; concept-driven categories for the coding frame were taken directly from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar. The data-driven categories, on the other hand, are the Types introduced in the previous paragraph. By applying the coding frame to the material results in numeric data, which makes this study also a quantitative one. In the present study, the numeric data enables discussion and comparison, firstly of all the data, secondly, between the Types and, finally, between the different volumes. In other words, this study is both a qualitative and quantitative one.
All in all, both the position of advertising in the world today and the small attention to how children are represented in them argue for a valid thesis topic. As one cannot escape advertising, it follows that one cannot help being influenced by advertising, either. The images we see in advertisements each day both contribute to and reflect on how we see the world around us, what we believe to be valuable and how we see ourselves as part of that world. Therefore, it is important to study advertising and to become more conscious of the representations offered to us.
This study consists of six chapters. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical background of this study: a short description of advertising, previous studies about children and consumerism and children in advertisements. Chapter two also focuses on presenting the Visual Grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen. After presenting the theoretical background, Chapter three firstly focuses on the aims and research questions, secondly on the data selection and collection and lastly on the methodology applied to this study. Chapter four includes the main analysis of this study which is divided into four parts: explaining the analysis procedure, introducing the average
representation of a child, discussion of the findings in relation to the Types, and comparison throughout the years. Finally, in Chapter five, the findings of this study will be discussed in relation to the research questions and previous research and the limitations of this study will be addressed with suggestions for future research.